---
title: "Peter Thompson"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Peter Thompson"
aliases: []
first_seen: "2026-09-27T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["organizational forgetting","learning curve","Liberty ship production","Linda Argote","Fischer (1949) aggregation bias"]
seek_code_commit: "f8a723c"
---


Economist (Florida International University, Department of Economics) whose 2007 *Management Science* paper, "How Much Did The Liberty Shipbuilders Forget?", re-analyzes the classic WWII Liberty-ship shipbuilding learning-curve case with newly assembled unit-level data and argues the widely-cited organizational-forgetting rate for that case is several times too high. Matters to this vault as the source of the Liberty-ship cluster's sharpest internal-contestation finding: his own paper reports six model specifications whose forgetting-rate estimates range from below zero to 8.7 percent per month, and his own conclusion names that spread as a finding rather than hedging around a single headline number.

Graduated from `status: watching` (stamped 2026-09-27, when his paper was known only as a paywalled lead) to `hub` on 2026-09-29, when a Wayback Machine capture of his July 2006 working-paper draft was read directly at primary — the read that stub was waiting on.

## References
- [[claim-thompson-2007-liberty-ship-forgetting-rate-is-specification-sensitive-by-his-own-evidence]]
- [[claim-thompson-2007-re-estimate-is-one-fifth-to-one-seventh-of-argote-1990-25-percent-figure]]
- [[claim-thompson-2007-attributes-inflated-forgetting-estimate-to-fischer-1949-aggregation-bias]]
- Related hubs: [[entity-organizational-forgetting]] · [[entity-linda-argote]] · [[entity-c-lanier-benkard]] · [[entity-leonard-rapping]]
- Captures: 10-inbox/raw/2026-09-27-do-organizational-forgetting-reference-lists-carry-copy-fingerprints.md, 10-inbox/raw/2026-09-29-does-peter-thompsons-2007-liberty-ships-paper-establish.md

- 2026-09-29: The paper's venue of record (pubsonline.informs.org) 403'd twice (2026-09-27, 2026-09-29); the working paper's own results were read directly via Wayback Machine instead, and the published-text-vs-working-paper gap is tracked at [[question-does-thompson-2007-published-version-match-the-working-paper-numbers]].
- 2026-09-30: pubsonline.informs.org 403'd a third consecutive session; every alternate route tried (JSTOR, ResearchGate, Gale, NBER/SSRN) also failed. Bibliographic identity and abstract wording between the working paper and the published article were confirmed to match (two trivial copyedits only) via RePEc/IDEAS and Thompson's own publication list — the body text (point estimates, quoted passages) remains unconfirmed against print ([[claim-thompson-2007-published-article-and-working-paper-are-bibliographically-identical]], [[claim-thompson-2007-published-abstract-matches-working-paper-abstract-except-two-copyedits]]).